True, but I feel like the strength of the moderation at HN is that it is mostly formal and less editorial. People are moderated mostly for how they say things, not what they're saying, especially by explicitly choosing as the primary criteria for the site what hackers find interesting.

Not that you couldn't have a narrower focus, but it should be an explicit focus where the question of whether something merits moderation is a yes or no question that could be answered by anyone, rather than a know it when I see it stance that just reflects the current personal standards of an individual or clique.

Does this belong on Hacker News? Was it upvoted and not flagged too often by people with sufficient karma on Hacker News? Then dang doesn't have to make a decision. This is not a perfect characterization, because moderation here does rarely drop into attempts to exclude types of discussions that the patrons find annoying (which is rationalized because the subjects are controversial and draw in people who want to fight, and repetitive because these people fight all the time so have habits and standard arguments.)

I'm really just expanding on the word "empowered" here, because most mods have absolute power unless they have to answer to other mods. The difference here is not power, it's philosophy.